As part of my Mother's Day festivities, I had to cook Shrimp Etoufee and clean up a dirty kitchen - what great Mother's Day. Hahahaa, actually Tim and I planned for it and wanted to do it together as a fun activity. Given we've had hardly anytime time to ourselves since the opening of the Burlingame store, we were looking forward to it. Prior to cooking dinner though, Tim cooked me a superb brunch from the Bouchon cookbook, Apricot french toast w/ Creme Anglaise, Chicken Apple Sausages, and Eggs with Smoked Salmon. This got me thinking we should have a brunch themed "dinner" one of these days. We then spent a lovely day strolling Sausalito with Alia, and ate some fish and chips from a dive that were actually quite tasty, followed by some Lappert's ice cream. After we fed Alia and put her down to sleep, the fun part started: Le Shrimp Etoufee.
Tim prepped all the vegetables and as you can tell from the photo below he has a great mise en place. He's much more precise than I am at chopping and dicing and has expressed interest in taking a knife course. If anyone is interested in taking one with him, we hear there is a great one offered by the Kitchen on Fire cooking school in Berkeley.
This dish was quite easy to prepare (sans chopping all the vegetables) and was an easy one dish supper. Perfect for a Sunday evening meal. We halved the recipe and also used shrimp as did Lee and John. However, we weren't so adventurous (or should I say we were just plain lazy) in trying to make our own stock. However, we found a great alternative at Whole Paycheck. A canned fish stock that actually tasted pretty authentic. I didn't really want to use chicken broth and so was happy to have found this option.
As John suggested, we didn't put the shrimp in when making the roux, since the mixture had to simmer for another 30 minutes once the roux was made. We put the shrimp in 12 minutes before our 30 minutes were up and they turned out perfect. Juicy and and nicely cooked.
The only hiccup we had was that we accidentally added the entire amount of cayenne (1/4 tsp) instead of halving it. When tasting the dish, I felt it was a bit too spicy until we figured out the mistake. Note to self, make sure you halve all ingredients properly when taking a recipe down in scale.
The dish was tasty but I wondered if the flavors would meld better the next day as the recipe suggested. We'll be eating this again tomorrow as leftovers and can report back. I think the extra cayenne also overpowered the dish so I'm excited to taste the version with less at our upcoming dinner.
Finally, we noticed John's comment on how hard it was to plate this dish to make it look nice, so Tim came up with this fancy "parsley bonsai tree" on top of the rice. Apparently, he's always wanted to do this :)
Next up this week, we'll be trying the bittersweet chocolate pecan pie. Since I happen to have all the ingredients at Teacake, I'm going to make this at the Burlingame store this week and sell it by the slice! I'll know if it's a winner if it sells out. Watch out for the next update!
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